The Britten Sinfonia’s programming is usually so inspired that it’s a surprise to question it. This was a 70th birthday tribute to John Adams, the most exuberant and successful standard-bearer of what, like it or not, is known as the minimalist school. But was it a celebration, or an indication that the school is hitting a dead end?
Admittedly, the Sinfonia is limited by its size in terms of which Adams’s works it can play. The pieces chosen were 1992’s Chamber Symphony and 1982’s Grand Pianola Music. In between, it was joined by the highly professional teenage trainees of the Britten Sinfonia Academy, for Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, a 1969 piece that doggedly defines minimalist techniques.
The only work from the last quarter-century was a new one: Steady Hand by Timo Andres, a concerto for two pianos – a “hyperinstrument”, as Andres said during an on-stage chat during a scene change – and orchestra, with him and David Kaplan as soloists. But even this was Adams-lite, lacking the older composer’s subversiveness. The second of the two movements achieves neatly the sense of travelling very fast but very smoothly, but in general, 50 years after Steve Reich wrote Piano Phase, the two-piano writing sounded tame.
Conducted by Benjamin Shwartz, it was all very well played, from the manic, cartoony scramble of the Chamber Symphony to the highly textured eclecticism of Grand Pianola Music. Back in 1982, all these half-echoes of Wagner and Beethoven sounded mischievous, even acerbic. Now they sound like John Adams. That, for the whole minimalist school, is both Adams’s achievement and his curse.
